Major league loss presents challenge to Team McConnell

Published on Sunday 5 May 2002 01:00

THIS weekend Wendy Alexander has again done the three things she does so well. She has wrong-footed the First Minister, dominated the Scottish media and shocked her friends.

Her leaving, for the moment, of high office is of a piece with all her actions since she started working at the highest level of Scottish government as special adviser to Donald Dewar, then Scottish Secretary, in May 1997.

She has always been that most unusual of political animals - the politician who not only wants power but knows exactly what they want to do with it. The product of her thinking has been the defining policies of New Labour in office in Scotland: the Glasgow housing stock transfer, free central heating for older people, the commitment to social justice (and the detailed plan for delivering it). Practical policy has been matched with ambitious analysis and visionary strategies.

Just last week she was bullishly promoting her strategy for a "smart, successful Scotland", calling for a national consensus on future economic policy and characteristically demanding that that consensus be behind her views. All backed with an implicit challenge: "come and have a go if you think you’re bright enough".

All who have met her acknowledge that her drive, her intellectual reach and her dominance of almost every setting in which she finds herself are qualities rarely found in contemporary politicians.

She inspires respect inside and outside the Executive. Yet there is another side to Wendy which is as much part of her as all her strengths. Brooking no obstacle to her chosen ambition she could regard even the most constructive objection as being evidence of an entrenched opposition which had to be bulldozed aside.

So clear, so determined in her own thinking, she was able to screen out alternative views or overwhelm them with the velocity and quantity of the facts and figures with which her speech is normally studded. A style of work that - at times - burnt rather than built bridges. But for everyone seriously involved with Scottish politics she has always been part of the future.

The question which was being asked again and again on Friday morning as phones rang off the hook was why? Why now? There is probably no single, simple answer. Yes, as she says, she has been in top-flight Scottish politics for five years. Yet surely that’s a reason to stay on - as Brown and Blair fully intend to in Westminster. She has done much, but there is still much left to do. Ultimately, it is clear that Wendy found the circumstances in which she had to work as a minister were unsustainable. Jack McConnell has to take responsibility for that, just as Wendy has taken full responsibility for her decision to resign.

It is a critical part of modern management to look after your talent. Both Donald Dewar and Henry McLeish were strongly committed to supporting younger members of the Cabinet to grow as politicians. Space was given to individual ministers to run their departments and there was an open opportunity to contribute to broader strategy. A keynote of McConnell’s administration has been a return to a centralisation more akin to that associated with a Secretary of State rather than a First Minister. This has been accompanied by the creation of a tight inner core who control overall political direction.

It must have been frustrating for the Cabinet’s most creative political thinkers to find herself locked out and it is no secret that Alexander found herself increasingly isolated.

Her loss is a blow to the Cabinet and the Executive as a whole. Just as Sir Alex Ferguson would take the rap if Roy Keane was to announce his resignation so McConnell cannot evade responsibility for the loss of Alexander. It is not as if the Cabinet can easily bear it.

In 1999 the first Scottish Cabinet had half a dozen heavyweights: Donald Dewar, Jim Wallace, Henry McLeish and Sam Galbraith - all with substantial Westminster experience; and Wendy Alexander and Jack McConnell - the two most talented politicians of their generation. Now only Wallace and McConnell remain in the Cabinet.

There is more Cabinet experience on the Labour back benches than in the current Cabinet (including the Liberal Democrats). Indeed McConnell himself has more Cabinet experience than all his Labour cabinet colleagues put together.

So what happens next? The already heated debate about how to replace Alexander has raised in stark terms the issues of talent and experience.

The wholescale Cabinet cull when McConnell entered office was never sustainable long term. It was understandable that while he took a grip of the official machine, he wanted to maximise loyalty and minimise backbiting.

That has, to some extent proved successful, and the febrile atmosphere of the early years of devolution, with its perennial sniping and briefing, has disappeared.

(Though anonymous briefing about colleagues - Cabinet or backbench - has proved too tempting a weapon to renounce completely.) The challenge now is to move to more inclusive politics within the Labour Party. So far more important than whether Iain Gray moves to Enterprise (although he is a talent who is increasingly being recognised as having a key role to play long term) or that Margaret Curran is promoted to the Cabinet, is the signal about the possibility of life after the backbenches.

Frank McAveety has been invited back to government to fill the deputy ministerial vacancy at the health department created by the mini-reshuffle. A move like that has clearly shown that others can hope to return to ministerial office.

As for Wendy, she is likely to find life on the backbenches much harder than she can imagine. The support system placed round a Minister by the civil service is substantial and immensely effective.

Malcolm Rifkind described the change by saying that when you’re no longer a minister you still get into the back seat of your car but it doesn’t move. Alexander will almost certainly still generate 60 or 70 e-mails a day but she will have to action them herself.

Will she return to government in the future? By rights she should. Scottish politics cannot afford to waste such a talent.

And the very nature of our Parliament - elected by PR, with coalition governments - suggests that our politicians will have European-style careers with many periods in office in a range of posts rather than the Westminster ‘up-the-greasy-pole-and-out’ model.

But a fruitful return to office for her will require the First Minister to demonstrate - over time - the inclusiveness, the generosity and broad vision that his post demands.